Quotes About Writing

My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.

I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.

We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

Every single line on the Oscar show is negotiated. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how it is put together. It's like nothing else on earth. I'm writing a book about it, but I have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells.

I was very anxious when I was writing 'Oscar And Lucinda.' I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK.

I have a great job writing for 'The Office,' but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

In the process of writing '13,' friends were asking if I was OK because I was saying things about religion or about intervening in other countries militarily that I wouldn't normally spout over dinner. In the moment of writing the play, I genuinely changed what I thought.

When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn't.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.

I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

Ideally, writing ought to be like riding a bicycle: something you know how to do without having to think consciously about exactly what it is that you are doing.

The best part of our lives is just every day when we are writing.

First and foremost I am a commercial writer, and I hope to entertain people. But having said that, I'm in love with the relationship between humans and dogs, and the more I learned about what our military working dogs are doing, I wanted to at least share with people what an important role these animals have in all our lives.

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives.

Our music was, like, Doors-y, but trying to be classical. We all took music classes and tried writing songs, and when we put them together they were this crazy amalgam of insane ideas that we thought was really cool.

Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway.